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This past week, members of the Oxonian Review editorial staff visited the Albion Beatnik Bookstore on Walton Street. We had a chance to chat with Albion’s owner, Dennis Harrison, and to take some photos of his elegant, whimsical shop. Albion opened in 2008 and features, in Dennis’s words, “interesting fiction of the 20th century, with an emphasis on alternative culture and the beatnik life—travel, poetry, popular music, and jazz.”

Indeed, Albion boasts world-class collections of both “Beat” literature and jazz-related writing, and hits most other 20th-century avant-garde and counter-cultural high points along the way. With its extensive offering of modern British, American, and European poetry and fiction and its well selected (and cheap!) secondhand section, Albion represents a bold and refreshing gesture of indie vitality in a city whose independent book and music store scene has barely a pulse.

Dennis spoke with us for about 45 minutes, while we all sipped coffee and listened to Miles Davis. The wood-floors, book-lined shelves, and jazzy atmosphere made Albion a lovely place to spend an afternoon. The following is a brief excerpt from our conversation:

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OR: How did you choose the name Albion Beatnik?

DH: Albion is an old word for England, and beatnik is an American slang word introduced by Jack Kerouac in the late 1940s (he claimed from the word “beatific”). I just liked it, really. Though, “beatnik” on the sign outside probably looks worse to a passersby than “jazz” would!

OR: It looks like you order a lot of your books from American publishers. I noticed, for instance, that you carry the American editions of Kurt Vonnegut…

DH: I try more and more to order books from the US because they’re so much nicer, and different. The Vonneguts, for instance, have such wonderful covers, and I don’t understand why a book shouldn’t be pleasant to look at as well as to read. And quite often they’re on acid-free paper, so they’re going to last longer.

OR: Do you see the bookshop as providing a cultural service to Oxford?

DH: Well, that’s what I’d like to do. But as I’ve said, this shop is also self-indulgent. It’s not about me being a magnanimous and tremendously good fellow; it’s about doing more than just having a bookshop. That’s why I enjoy being a bookseller in my other shop [Wendover Bookshop], where I put on jazz concerts in the shop and in the local church. People love it, and that’s great, you know. It’s better than watching TV.

OR: You opened Albion in Christmas 2008. How long have you had your other bookshop?

DH: About 21 years.

OR: And how would you categorize Albion?

DH: Well, I’m not going to say it’s a niche bookshop, but it’s not a general bookshop either. You wouldn’t come in here and buy a gardening book. I don’t sell children’s books. Albion focuses primarily on interesting fiction of the 20th century, with an emphasis on alternative culture and the beatnik life—travel, poetry, popular music, and jazz.

OR: So you aren’t just trying to sell the latest bestsellers. I see, for instance, that there’s a stack of House of Leaves and Infinite Jest on the shelf right there…

DH: Yeah, because they’re more interesting. I mean, I’m not sure I’d personally want to read House of Leaves, but…!

(Laughter.)

OR: And finally, one last question: do you have a favourite author?

DH: Joseph Conrad.

OR: Thank you.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Stephen is the editor in chief at the Oxonian Review.

Sarah Leyla Puello is reading for a DPhil in Modern Languages at Wolfson College, Oxford. Sarah is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. Akshat is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

Born in 1946, Philip Pullman graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, and went on to become a teacher. He published his first book for children, Count Karlstein, in 1982, and has produced over 20 novels and other works since. Pullman has been honored for his writing with numerous prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Eleanor Farjeon Award for Children’s Literature, and the Carnegie of Carnegies.

He is the author of numerous novels, including The Broken Bridge (1990), the Sally Lockhart mysteries, and the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman has also published a number of fairy tales and plays. Many of his works have been adapted for screen and stage, including The Golden Compass (2007) and His Dark Materials, which debuted on stage in 2003. Pullman has been a fellow in the Creative Writing MA programme at Oxford Brookes University since 2008.

You recently have been concerned with enhancing the graphic and tactile quality of your work, particularly the illustrations, maps, and other physical objects related to your Dark Materials books. Is this a conscious move toward more physical reading objects?

Well, it’s partly publishers. Publishers always like to have a new edition to put out, something new and fresh that hasn’t been seen before. I’m a little bit worried about that because after a while it can become just a scamming of the reader. But if there’s a chance to say something new in graphic form, then I think it’s worth doing. I’ve always been fascinated by this interplay between word and picture, and the one thing doing what the other thing can’t do—sometimes the one thing undercutting or subverting what the other can do. One thing I would like to do one day is a sort of PowerPoint book that exists in a kind of presentation with picture succeeding picture, graphic works merging with text, and so on.

Do any of your current projects fit this format?

I’m halfway there with one thing that I’ve been doing, which is a forgery. Something that’s always fascinated me is the work of the architect Andrea Palladio, who wrote books of architecture [I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura or The four books of architecture] in 1570. At the minute I’ve got a little story that I tell about one of the plans in this book, because there’s a little anomaly in which the measurement doesn’t work. The design has been reprinted and recut many, many times, and everyone has repeated this mistake without noticing it.

So what I did was to forge a page of Palladio’s book. Well, I didn’t forge the page. I forged some notes on it, in the handwriting of Inigo Jones, the great English architect. Because in Worcester College, Oxford, there is Inigo Jones’s own copy [I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura] with annotations, but he didn’t notice this little mistake, so I have had him notice it and done a little thing like that. When I put the story into the final form, I’ll see if there is a way of publishing it on my website.

Your companion pieces to the Dark Materials books, Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time in the North, do not limit themselves to the Will and Lyra story. Do you envision any future installments, perhaps involving Mary Malone or the wheel people, or the Sebastian Makepeace character, which seems to have been left open?

Yes, probably a story about Will. There are many left, plus it’s an interesting length. The story in Lyra’s Oxford is more of a short story, whereas Once Upon a Time in Oxford is more of a novella sort of length. I once thought I couldn’t do a shorter piece, but I’m just at the point of finishing a book that is 100 pages long. What frustrates me with the short story is the fact that you can’t really get going with the background—you can only sort of sketch it in.

I always would rather take a bit more time and spend more effort in establishing a world, and I think you can do that in 100 pages or so. Henry James used that length a lot—the blessed novella, he called it. I don’t think I’ve adapted my style. It’s a question of pruning down the other stories—a question of focusing on one story rather than on three or four, I think.

You’re a writer who has negotiated a lot of different genres, including fantasy, science fiction, adventure, comics, crime, and historical fiction. Have you ever considered doing a non-fictional book project, perhaps a memoir?

Yes, but not yet. The British Library, a year or two ago, set up a programme on lives, and they asked me if I wanted to be in on this project and record my life for the British Library. I thought about it and said no, because that’s my material. If I give it all away, not only will it be not really private anymore, but it will have been fixed in some form that maybe isn’t useful to me. I like it fluid. I will write a memoir, but some day, not yet—and when I do I’m sure I’ll make most of it up, because that way it’s still private. But there are a couple of other nonfiction things that I want to do. One is a book on the fundamental units of narrative.

What shape would this study of narrative take? Would it be a William Empson-esque exploration of a form?

Well, I’m not as clever as he was. So this will be a very practical and pretty straightforward thing, I think. I’m very impressed by the way David Hockney talks about painting. He talks about it in very practical terms. That is, when you’ve got a pencil, you can make one kind of mark with it, and with watercolor painting, it sloshes about, so you must use it in a certain way. Because he has done so much looking and drawing, he can see in another painting whether somebody isn’t doing it from life, because there’s a certain flatness that he can put his finger on straightaway.

I am very impressed by that as a way of talking about story. What I mean is looking at a story and sensing exactly when a writer’s attention has gone off the line of the story—you can see that after you’ve done it yourself for a while. I’m going through Grimm’s fairy tales at the moment, to select 70 of them for an edition for Penguin Classics. Some of them don’t need retelling, because they’re beautiful, they’re just perfect. Others need a bit cut out, because it gets in the way, and goes nowhere, and does nothing. You can see that almost instantaneously.

Your work has been adapted in many ways, including for the stage and screen. Are there any other mediums in which you would like your ideas portrayed?

Sally Lockhart has been done on the television, but one day I will write Sally Lockhart short stories, which I think will make much better television than the novels have done. And Henry Selick, who directed Coraline, is doing Count Karlstein next.

Would this be a claymation, stop-motion type of film?

I very much hope so. He’s working on the script at the moment—it all depends on financing. But I’m a huge fan of Henry Selick, and I loved The Nightmare Before Christmas [he was creative supervisor]. I would love him to do my book Clockwork, which I think is absolutely made for him. But we shall see.

How do you think your place in the canon of modern literature is defined by the genres in which people classify your work? Do you think that young-adult books or fantasy books are sequestered, in a way?

I don’t think about canons at all. I’m not even sure what genres I write in. I suppose I have to classify His Dark Materials as a sort of a fantasy, it’s not exactly realism, though I hope it’s psychologically more real than most fantasy. Critical fashion has a lot to do with this, but we don’t know who will survive. Canons are for time to decide, not for the present day.

Rebecca Rosen is reading for an MSt in English at Jesus College, Oxford.

Since graduating from Keble College, Oxford in 1953 Geoffrey Hill has pursued a joint career as academic and poet. From 1988 until retirement in 2006 he taught at Boston University, where he co-founded the Editorial Institute with fellow academic and Oxford’s current Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks. Hill’s academic interests are unusually wide-ranging; his recent Collected Critical Writings (OUP, 2008) contains essays across a wide spectrum of poets, critics, theologians, and philosophers from the Reformation to the late 20th century.

His first publication was a pamphlet in the now-celebrated Fantasy Poets series, a joint-venture of the Eynsham-based artist Oscar Mellor and the Oxford University Poetry Society; this appeared at the beginning of his third undergraduate year at Keble, and, like other pamphlets in the series (which included Adrienne Rich and George Steiner), is now a “collector’s item”. Since that time he has published 12 individual books of poetry. A Selected Poems appeared from Penguin in 2006; a Collected Poems is scheduled for 2012. Hill is an honorary fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (where he taught from 1980 until 1988) and of Keble College, Oxford. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from Leeds and Warwick.

What follows is an edited version of an interview given at Keble on the morning of 27 February. On the previous evening he had addressed the Lord Herbert of Cherbury Society at Jesus College on the theme “Strongholds of the Imagination”.

As a poet and as an academic, what do you think the poet’s place should be within the institution of the university?

I don’t have much faith in creative writing courses such as the Master of Fine Arts programmes so prevalent in the States and increasingly active in the UK. I believe that poets should be self-taught, based on an intensive programme of preferably serendipitous reading. I exempt the Oxford Chair of Poetry and the Christopher Tower Chair at Christ Church; these are currently in very good hands and the emphasis on traditional teaching methods is probably firm. Auden used to hold informal sessions, for those who cared to attend, in a coffee shop in the Broad; that also I find entirely acceptable. I’m sorry to say that among early practitioners of creative writing degree classes in the States were people I greatly respect, such as the poet Allen Tate and the novelist Caroline Gordon. But at the time they were struggling to live by their wits, and were probably at their wit’s end.

Have you ever taught creative writing?

Once only; that was 50 years ago in the States. To teach creative writing well requires a particular kind of self-confidence which I didn’t possess. Looking back over so many years I feel more sorry for the students than for myself. It must have been a dismal experience for them also.

What is the public role of the poet? Are they historians or journalists?

Not quite in the sense that I think you intend. Obviously the poet’s public role is to be first and foremost a poet. But it is not ‘philosophically’ wrong for a poet to be deeply, or heavily, involved with journalism and/or politics; it all turns on the matter of intrinsic quality. The public role of the poem is to be a stronghold of the imagination. I wish in a way that I hadn’t read English at Oxford even though I obtained a first, which I doubt I would have done if I’d read any other school (well, history maybe). If I’d read PPE [Philosophy, Politics, and Economics], in which no doubt I’d have got a lower second or a third, I could have taught myself the necessary contexts for writing English poetry (I virtually did so, anyway).

How do you envisage your own poetry’s readership?

Impossible to say. When I see my half-yearly royalties statements I seem not to have a readership at all. Yet in 2006 when I gave a reading in the Sheldonian the place was packed, chiefly with young people. And at poetry readings I continually meet older people who bring for signing a copy of every book since For the Unfallen (1959). A few even have the frail 1952 Fantasy pamphlet. There are obviously devoted readers, but it’s all rather subterranean, a bit like wartime resistance. When you ask about “public role” you have to take into account this aspect also.

You have said that you admire poetry which creates “strongholds of the imagination” and that is why you tend to write “strong poetry”. Was this the type of writing you had in mind when you first began composing poetry?

No. I became a poet because at the age of ten or thereabouts (and long before concepts like “strong poetry” would have had any meaning) I fell in love with English poetry. I was brought up in a Worcestershire village where my father was the local bobby. I sang in the church choir and attended Sunday school. And that year my good attendance prize was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Poetry, a Victorian bestseller. I might be impatient, even scornful now of some of its preferences, but to a boy of ten, it was a revelation and an initiation. From then until now there has been no escape. What I say latterly about strong poetry and semantics and the choice that poetry has, either to resist the pressures of the age or be imploded by them, these are my variants of Auden’s “dyer’s hand”; but the first reaction was total unjudgemental love. I should add that at Bromsgrove High School I had, as early even as the second form, a marvellous English teacher, Anne Gledhill, who was showing us Auden’s Look Stranger! poems.

Do you intend to reinvent your writing persona with every new collection?

Anyone reading through my Selected Poems might very well get that impression. The change in style between Mercian Hymns (1971) and Tenebrae (1978) was severe and intentional: from loping prose-poems to reined-back exercises in traditional forms, in particular the English versions of the Della Casan Sonnet (see F.T. Prince’s splendid The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, 1954). I wrote The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy in rhetorical quatrains modelled on Péguy’s own. Poets who had liked Mercian Hymns—and I was surprisingly popular for a brief while—hated Tenebrae and The Mystery. I have to admit that, in changing about, I’m setting myself formal problems in order to see whether I can solve them, carry them through, to my own satisfaction (which can be pretty demanding). I think that people who in some odd way respect me bear with me; and that those who, for understandable reasons, don’t, don’t.

Is there any kind of unity across your work?

If there is unity it probably resides in a sense of gratitude to past, partly erased, national and international human intelligence and in my desire to celebrate it formally. I’m an in memoriam poet; have been since my earliest days, the days of the Fantasy Pamphlet in 1952. In the English 17th century I admire equally Hobbes and his great opponent Clarendon (and have written critical essays on both). I have learned much of value from a Catholic (Péguy) and a Confucian (Pound). Salman Rushdie says somewhere—I hope my memory serves—that he has always believed that literature should conduct an argument with the world. I’m drawn to writers who seem to me to be brave, beleaguered, and cheerful—like John Dryden.

What motivated you to write your most recent collection A Treatise of Civil Power?

The initial impulse to put together a book may be trivial. In the case of A Treatise I wanted a work that would resemble in appearance a pamphlet by John Milton: the likeness is evident only in the original Clutag Press edition; later printings by Penguin and Yale have lost it. I have summoned the presiding genius of Milton several times: he features in Canaan (1996), in The Triumph of Love (1998), and of course in Scenes From Comus (2005). I greatly admire his political sonnets. I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy.

Until very recently I thought that I had invented the term plutocratic anarchy, but it appears to have originated with William Morris. A few days ago I happened upon the text of a lecture delivered at University College, Oxford in 1883 (“John Ruskin in the Chair”). Morris’s term, to be precise, is “anarchical Plutocracy”.

Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention; it is the enemy of everything that is summoned before us in Bishop Butler’s great pronouncement of 1729; “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood.

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962 and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, before completing a doctorate on the verse of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1993. His dissertation was published belatedly as D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (2003), with a preface by poet and critic Tom Paulin.

Chaudhuri has written five novels, among them A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), which won the Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, A New World (2000), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, most recently, The Immortals (March 2009), his first novel in nine years. He has also authored several collections of essays, poetry and short stories, and edited The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001). His criticism and fiction have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic and the New Yorker. He is the first Indian on the judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize. Chaudhuri is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and divides his time between England and Calcutta. He is also an acclaimed Indian classical musician.

The Immortals tells the story of three Indian musicians: a mother, her son and their guru, who is a classical music teacher. Set in Bombay during the 1970s and 1980s, it traces two families separated by status and circumstance, yet inextricably connected through the bond of music. Chaudhuri interweaves art and relationships, meditating on the conflict between aesthetic and commercial values in an India transformed by globalisation.

Chaudhuri’s writing is suffused with the sounds and textures of everyday life: the rituals of a neighbourhood, of a family preparing dinner, of a music lesson. His minutely observed novels are quiet, almost uneventful, but far from complacent. Like those of his revered predecessor, D.H. Lawrence, Chaudhuri’s polemics embrace the ordinary with courage, allowing moments of life—sometimes comical, but often tragically commonplace—to blossom.

The Immortals is so much about music. Music has been a theme in your writing before, but this is the first time you’ve explored it in such depth.

I’ve written about music, as you pointed out, in Afternoon Raag, but in The Immortals, what I’m looking at for the first time is the relationship between music and its contexts: human lives, the necessity of compromise, relationships defined by power, helplessness and dependence. The novel genre, with its web of interrelationships, provides a particularly apposite way of doing that.

Did it come out of working on your own music?

It came out of becoming increasingly aware, through the 1990s, of the way the world had changed. The world became unipolar. India liberalised and became part of that world. A different web of relationships—to do with human beings but also with the market—had come into existence. And in the midst of all this were the old notions—now suddenly a bit anomalous or obsolete—of the artist and the artwork.

Although all this seemed to have happened overnight, with epiphanic moments like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the change had been happening subtly. In Bombay—which would become the major city of post-liberalisation India—the groundwork of change was being laid from the very early 1980s. This is why the novel is about Bombay at that time, a time when the city found itself on the cusp of something, at a crossroads.

The protagonist, Nirmalya, has a very tense relationship with his guru and practically chastises him for “selling out”. Is this a time when Indian bourgeois values come into seeming conflict with artistic values?

By the end of the seventies, India gradually saw the decline of the bourgeoisie in the old sense—that is, of the Nehruvian legacy and the older legacies of liberalism via, say, the Bengal Renaissance. A world emerged in India—as in other places—where it was okay to be rich, which it hadn’t been under the Nehruvian dispensation. It became okay to have desires and to be up-front about them.

In The Immortals, the traditional guru, oddly enough, seems to be able to cope with these facts better, and to take to the situation much more naturally, than the more romantic, educated, bourgeois boy. The so-called “traditional” in India has embraced capitalism, wonderfully, in a way in which bhadralok [middle-class] India has not. But with the music teacher it has tragic resonances as well, because he can’t quite go that far—and he fails. It has ironical, comic resonances for the boy because in the end he doesn’t lose anything. He does survive, even though he’s physically flawed. But he’s fine: in spite of all his affectations of poverty, he’s not poor. So the book is about the survival of the rich, which is an unsurprising story. The rich do survive.

Nirmalya classifies Hindu devotional songs like ragas and bhajans above Bollywood music or ghazals. Would you say that his judgments of Indian music are personally reflective?

Not of me now, but certainly I’m drawing upon what I was like, and reshaping that character. I’m interested in certain forms of exaggerated agony, things that make Nirmalya both comic and real, for me. And there’s enough distance between myself and the character for me to find it inherently fascinating that this incarnation should have been wandering about the world, looking at it in such ways. The early eighties was a time in which I was personally very unhappy, for a variety of reasons. I was always alienated from Bombay, but particularly so at that time. Just like Nirmalya, we had moved to an even bigger apartment in Cuffe Parade, and I hated that apartment. Retrospectively, that kind of unhappiness seems comic, but it also seems to offer a real key to that period: the [boy] with his exaggerated affectations and this whole phase he’s going through of rejecting the world.

Such as wearing the kurta… [traditional tunic]?

(Laughs). The torn kurta and the long hair, all of that, which he finally gets rid of in England. In Charlotte Street.

You write about the deep, abiding loneliness that Nirmalya experiences when he moves to London. Where does this suffering come from?

In a memoir in verse called E Minor, I talk about wanting to suffer yet having nothing to suffer for. It looks at the triviality, in retrospect, of this notion of suffering: the timelessness, the reasonlessness of suffering. Suffering should have a reason—given that, in the novel, Pyarelal is ill, Shyamji has died, Nirmalya’s in exile—but it seems to be there in and of itself, like a note in music seems to be there, like a resonance.

How does Bombay, a city in which one never really feels alone, compare with the sacrosanct privacy of Oxford or London?

It’s a strong contrast. If I were to speak for myself, I would say that I experienced a new kind of stillness, a new kind of silence and aloneness when I first moved to London in 1983. It was unnerving and educational. It taught me about who I am, about my need for noise and sound. That those were things of predominant value to me—the life of human beings, the life of the street, the life of objects—became clear. And these would shape the kind of novel I would write.

Human beings in themselves were not enough. If I’d been the type who could have been happy reading a novel in a room with the windows closed, in perfect communion with a world of characters, I would have written a novel about characters. I realized that it was a different kind of novel, one without the usual unfolding that we associate with psychological realism, that I wanted to write.

What kind of novel is it that you write? I wouldn’t call you a noisy novelist.

I’m not a noisy novelist, no. I’d say I write novels involving random digressions and distractions. I cannot dwell on one thing for too long. So I am not the right candidate to write a novel of deep psychological realism and inwardness, or a heavily researched historical novel with a kind of social-science sensibility—a type of writing I abhor, actually, but which is endemic to a lot of Indian writing. My novels deal with inwardness but also with outwardness, with allowing oneself to be seduced by distractions and interruptions, to let oneself go there.

You once wrote that Salman Rushdie is a “kind of hallucinatory cliff behind which we cannot see”, and you said that Midnight’s Children, especially, has defined reader expectations regarding Indian novels written in English. Pickle factories, explosions and magical realism, all of that. Do you see yourself writing in a particular tradition—that of the Indian novel or of the novel in general?

I do not see myself as writing in any kind of tradition, except perhaps one involving a kind of eclectic, homeless cosmopolitanism, which is paradoxically nostalgic about “neighbourhood” whilst also being attracted to the notion of “elsewhere”. This strand of eclectic cosmopolitanism thinks about neighbourhoods as recognizable but also as slightly foreign. If you’ve wandered about Europe or even outside the Anglophone world, you discover gradually a different story of globalisation from the one you’re aware of in the Anglophone world.

After quite a few years living abroad you moved back to Calcutta. Why?

Well, there are many reasons. One had been of course the abiding feeling of homesickness that I’d always had in this country. I had always thought I’d move back. There are many things I dislike about India, the worst being the hierarchical nature of the enlightened, liberal middle class. Despite that, the physicality of being there speaks to me in a way that completely disarms me: the moment I get off the airplane, clear customs and stand outside the airport waiting for the car. Even when I’m noticing things which dismay me slightly, there’s this contradictory feeling of rightness, of my self coming back to me. This is nothing to do with Indian identity or Indian nationalism. It’s something else.

The other reason was that I was a bit disappointed by post-Thatcherite England and by what had happened to England in the nineties. Not only did no high culture exist anymore, but as Ian Sinclair very insightfully points out, popular culture became crap too. So there was a closing-down of possibilities, it seemed, a narrowing of heterogeneity. I just got fed up. In Calcutta, although the city was also stagnating in many ways, I thought: “I still have things to discover because it’s not been all taken over in that way.”

In your essay “Thoughts in a Temple” (2004), you say, “the idea of the peace-loving Hindu has been turned inside out” and “the most innocent-seeming of activities appear to be charged with unarticulated violence”. This was written in response to the 2002 Gujarat Hindu-Muslim riots, to a restrained violence that you see developing in Hinduism—or, rather, Hindutva [movement advocating Hindu nationalism]—in the 21st century. What did you see in the temple?

I’m struck by visibility: what is visible and what lies beneath the visible, so I went to the Birla temple [in Calcutta] and I found these people, at peace. Ordinarily it would be fine, but because something had happened, like the carnage in Gujarat, the peacefulness seemed like a form of violence. What were they contented about? They were contented about beginning to do well: the economy was beginning to boom.

Were you angry when you wrote it, when you visited the temple?

I was. I was angry and mystified and baffled and also felt that something had been destroyed. Besides the lives of the Muslims being destroyed, the tone and texture of a certain dimension of modernity that had to do with the spiritual, and that came in a special way through Hinduism, had been destroyed.

You refer to the Hindi film industry in The Immortals, and you’ve mentioned Satyajit Ray in an essay on Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali. Are you a Bollywood-watcher, or do you tend toward arthouse films?

I have no clear loyalties. I grew up mainly watching Western cinema. When I was a teenager, I began to watch arthouse films. By no means was I an unequivocal admirer. That’s because I reacted, without quite understanding, against what I saw to be the existentialism or the absurdism of people like Bergman.

Later on I discovered that Bergman was full of life. But at that time, I was trying to get away from that. And later on, in A Strange and Sublime Address, one of the things I was trying to get away from was the existentialism of the seventies. Into the street, into random sounds, all of that. So I didn’t like anything that was in a kind of penumbra of interiority. I liked Satyajit Ray, with his wonderful humanism but his Renoir-like eye. Then when I came to England, I began to discover the Hindi film cinema of the 1950s and 1960s

Like Guru Dutt?

Guru Dutt. And Raj Kapoor. Then in the nineties, I began to discover the new Bollywood cinema. That began to interest me, because often it was very cinematic. There was a kind of fluidity to the camera angles that Hollywood didn’t have. Hollywood seemed static and prefabricated. Bollywood films also imported certain things from the changing life of globalised India. So you would suddenly have characters talking on their cell-phones or watching one-day cricket matches in a way that found no space in “serious” genres. In the early 2000s it became a kind of multimillion global industry. But interesting things do keep happening. Vishaal Bharadwaj reworked Macbeth into Maqbool and Othello into Omkara, and those are amazing films by any standards. And you can’t just call them arthouse cinema either.

And then something like Slumdog Millionaire comes along. Have you seen it?

Yeah.

What did you think?

My wife and I went to see it prepared to vomit all over the floor. We didn’t. I wasn’t repelled by it. It was slickly made; it was completely unmemorable. It’s just that I wasn’t as offended as other people were. I didn’t think it was poverty porn. I thought Danny Boyle was too preoccupied with his own Anglo-Saxon repressions to do with the body and shitting and things like that. But no frame contained within it any image or information that was special. It could have. As, for instance, when those two boys go into the abandoned hotel room. An abandoned hotel room contains all kinds of interesting items, but Danny Boyle didn’t seem to have noticed any of them.

It was episodic.

It was episodic too. I’m not against the episodic. But I felt that he might have smuggled in some interesting details that were true to that world. I think some Bollywood directors have done more of that.

You’ve been called a kind of observer of everyday life, or modern Indian manners. Is this accurate?

No, not really. I think I’m an experimenter in form. The everyday interests me as an intensely vivid, energetic, vibrant entity against the abstract and the epic. It’s always implicitly against something, and that’s why it possesses for me such energy and possibility. To say “yes” to the here and now is to reject so much.

How do you view this epidemic of novels, films, even non-fiction—The White Tiger, Slumdog Millionaire—dealing with the underbelly of Indian life? Where do you see your writing in such a matrix?

I don’t mind the underbelly: anything involving a lot of smell and sound. I hate, of course, the genre (and the phrase), “sights and smells and sounds of India”. But I like anything that has physicality and presence. It’s more difficult to get physicality and presence into a description of, let’s say, Balliol’s common room in Holywell Manor [where the interview took place], but it doesn’t matter to me what it is.

I was wondering if you had read Imagining India?

Who’s the writer?

Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys.

The CEO and the “seer”. What is it, a self-help manual?

I think it’s supposed to be a kind of vision.

Of India…

A vision of globalised India.

I’m completely anti “Indian” in that sense. Anything with India in the title puts me off.

Lakshmi Krishnan is reading for a DPhil in English at New College, Oxford.

When the Oxonian Review sat down with Paul Collier in his office at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, he had just returned from a visit with the US State Department, where he had briefed top American policy makers on his rescue plan for the world’s poorest countries. With the publication of his first book, The Bottom Billion (2007), Paul Collier established himself as a premier authority on international development, presenting aid solutions for the world’s poorest billion inhabitants. In his newest book, Wars, Guns and Votes, Collier moves into the contentious realm of policymaking. Collier anticipates controversy. He writes in Wars, Guns and Votes: “I am aware that I walk on a tightrope.” And he is. Wars, Guns and Votes came out in the UK last week.

A major theme of your book is that democracy can be dangerous if elections are installed without providing the critical public good of security. You propose a game plan that involves installing peacekeepers to the bottom billion countries for at least a decade. This calls for long term intervention by the international community. Could you clarify your criteria for when national sovereignty should be breached?

I think national sovereignty being breached is a melodramatic way of putting it, but there are two distinct contexts that concern us. One is post-conflict situations. Obviously, in conflict situations, when they begin, something has gone terribly wrong with the poverty; you’ve had a civil war. The record of these post-conflict periods is not very happy… about 40 percent of these countries go back into conflict within a decade, and they are responsible for about half of the civil wars that have happened. So we should be able to, as an international community, do much better than that record.

The international community has a big responsibility to the whole neighbourhood because if these situations go wrong, it is the whole neighbourhood that bears the responsibility, not just the country itself.  This is one reason why there is a case for limiting sovereignty or sharing sovereignty on behalf of the legitimate interest of the neighbourhood. The international community is providing peace through the peacekeepers and the money for reconstruction and that gives it both the power and the legitimacy to make sure that the recovery works. […]

There are three key actors and there are no quick fixes. There is the Security Council which is providing the peacekeepers. There are the donors who are providing the money. And there’s the post-conflict government which is setting the policies and also determining how accountable they are to the people. So what I propose is a contract between these three parties and to recognise the interdependence.

But what about the third actor? The local government? Don’t you think that your game plan gives Mugabe the exact propaganda he needs to say: “Look, Western policemen are taking over Africa?”

Of course he will. You can hear him say it. You have to use your brain and say who has actually got the interest of these societies? Is it Mugabe with his fine record or is it mine? The truth is that there is no appetite for a new bout of colonialism. On the contrary, the main problem is that the appetite for concern is so low, and the prevailing sentiment is: “Just wash your hands of it and do things that are decorative.” So, the difficulty is not trying to restrain a voraciously powerful West that wants to restore colonialism, it’s trying to persuade a West that is [complacent]. I was on Capitol Hill just recently and the sentiment that was expressed to me, in the case of Somalia, was: “Build a fence around it and walk by.”

And what a lot of the bottom billion countries have is not national sovereignty; it’s presidential sovereignty. Presidents won’t share power with their own citizens. It’s grotesque that Mugabe is still in power, and certainly not thanks to the endorsement of [Zimbabwe’s] people. Nor will they pool power with their neighbouring government. […]

Presidents are clinging onto power vis-a-vis their own populations and vis-a-vis their neighbours. The result is that their states are not capable of supplying key public goods, so they’ll have to be supplied internationally.

Just now, you mentioned that you went to Washington to convince people to buy into your plan. And in the book, you put yourself in the shoes of a rational dictator weighing pros and cons of allowing international intervention. If you were in front of Mugabe now and had the ear of Obama, how would you persuade them both to sign onto your plan?

I was in the State Department on Monday and talking through these issues. Clearly, the Administration has a lot of legitimacy in Africa. If there were a fair election in Zimbabwe between Mugabe and Obama, Obama would win it easily. So in terms of who is the most legitimate actor, it is clearly Obama. So the issue with America is not legitimacy but overload. It’s whether they see sufficient interest to move. And the argument has to be a combination of an ethical argument based on compassion (here are people socially integrated into the world but economically completely marginalised; they cannot provide the key public goods themselves, so we have to help them to back out of the cul-de-sac they’re in), and a degree of enlightened self-interest—that it is actually foolish to leave societies so precarious that some of them become Somalias. The strategy of building a fence around Somalia and hoping that it disappears seems to me, really, an ostrich-line strategy.

The muddle over American intervention or non-intervention has been so extreme, ranging from total non-intervention (Somalia) to total intervention (Iraq), and a new discourse coming out of Hilary Clinton is “smart power”. That’s a hopeful discourse because what she means is a minimal use of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power. And that seems to me to be the right approach because we haven’t got much appetite for hard power, but […] we can show that the minimum of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power (money, international standards, legitimacy of Obama) can make a difference.

How was your dual argument for ethical compassion and enlightened self-interest received when you actually talked about this to Washington? Did they buy it?

Oh, absolutely. There’s a lot of buy in. I’ve been amazed ever since the publication of The Bottom Billion, there’s been a huge interest on the part of government to align with the agenda. Obviously, not people like Mugabe… they’re a part of the problem.

So the State Department got on board with this?

Well, you have to ask the State Department. But they invited me, and yes, I think there’s a lot of interest both in Europe and in America.

What were their objections?

I think… one strand of opinion would be basically pessimistic and say we’ve failed and failed, there is no point in trying anymore. So there’s a lot of fatigue and despair. And the other sentiment is the sort of, “build a fence and ignore it”…

So the White House didn’t object to your plan based on shortage of resources?

No. And of course, my approach is not just saying that all we need is twice as much money as you’d ever thought of. It’s a matter of marrying money with other policy interventions such as trade, governance, security. For example, I am having a discourse with the American administration on Haiti at the moment. They’ve already done the trade deal with Haiti. So now, the thing to do is to provide the rather modest amount of money that would make it feasible to export on the basis of that trade deal.

The US government has been involved in several coups of democratically elected leaders. Given that track record, do you think it’s really plausible for African dictators to buy into your proposed bait of offering to help them put down possible coups?

What I would like to see military intervention to be used for is to discourage coup d’états. There have been three coups in West Africa in this past week. I’m sure at this very moment, African presidents really are lying awake at night worrying about coup d’états. And the tragedy of coup d’états is that they displace democratic governments just as much as bad governments. Now, I don’t think we should try and prevent all coup d’états… the international community should use its military force to restore democratically elected governments—I don’t see any ethical issue in that. It would actually be disgraceful to do anything else. We already did it in Sierra Leone and nobody accused the international community of neo-colonialism in doing that. So there is a legitimate role for force, serious force in protecting democratic governments.

Now, the neat twist to that is that once you’ve got an undertaking to protect democratic governments, there has to be one condition at least, which is that the government conducts a democratic election. If it cheats, it should not be protected. So I propose an international standard that governments could undertake to adopt on the conduct of elections. And if they adopted that standard, they would be protected, as long as they conducted the election properly. If they then subsequently cheated on an election, that cover against the coup would be withdrawn, and the withdrawal would be a signal. Knowing that, presidents would be much more weary of cheating on elections…

What I was asking was not a normative question of whether or not the US and the international community should intervene to install democratic elections. I am saying that sometimes, the US government actually intervenes to put down democratically governments. Given this track record, how can they be trusted to safeguard democracy?

That’s why it is so important to have clear rules of engagement. When is it legitimate to use military force and when is it not? America’s got a force AFRICOM and that force needs clear rules of engagement because otherwise, as you say, it is going to be treated with a lot of suspicion. But the right rule of engagement is not “never intervene”. If there were a coup in Ghana tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would be to fly in and restore the legitimate government. If there were a coup in Zimbabwe tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would not be to fly in and restore Mugabe—and so we need clear rules to delineate that.

You propose a ten-year period of peacekeeping, during which the economy of the [post-conflict] country is supposed to double. If the economy doesn’t double, what do you propose then?

First of all, there’s already a lot of peacekeepers in there, there are over 100,000 of them now, so this is the future, like it or not. So, the question is really complementary strategies to peacekeeping. Precisely because these economies go so far down during the conflict, it’s relatively easy to get strong growth post-conflict, as long as you’ve got some restoration of reasonable policies, a guarantee of security and flows of aid. So it’s not difficult to get rapid growth. If you don’t get growth, then it’s true, quite possibly you haven’t got a viable exit strategy. Then you’ve got some hard choices, but the world doesn’t come in nice easy boxes.

What are some of those choices?

Well, do you pull the troops out anyway? Or, do you say: “This is harder than we thought, this is longer than we thought.” So, take a country like Liberia or Sierra Leone, or Haiti. So far, economic recovery hasn’t been that great. So does the international community just say: “Time’s up, bye-bye?”

Personally, I think that would be very foolish. Post-conflict is often messy, so the right thing to do is to do what it takes to get recovery… the US left over 100,000 troops in Europe for 40 years to get recovery, and it was a good strategy…it was the right thing to do.

Diana Fu is reading for a DPhil in Politics at Linacre College, Oxford, and is Politics Editor of the Oxonian Review. Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Photograph courtesy of Paul Collier

An exchange with sports writer Martin Samuel

Google “Martin Samuel” and, with some minor exceptions, you will find two types of result. The first is examples of his prize-winning journalism, spanning a career that his taken him from the Sun and the Daily Express to the Times and now the Daily Mail, and from the sports pages all the way to the op-ed columns. With the reams of column inches has come a raft of awards. He picked up the 2008 Sports Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards, and was Sports Journalist Association Sports Writer of the Year three years running from 2005 to 2007.

The second type is rather less flattering. Take these examples from an online forum for fans of Manchester United: “Samuel is a fat slug”; “a talentless scribe in a toss newspaper”; ”I cannot stand Martin Samuel”—and those are only the ones appropriate for publication. Some of the comments are positively eye-watering.

“That sort of thing can become a little trite,” Samuel said during an interview in his living room in a leafy London suburb. “The people who think you’ve got it in for their club, that gets very wearing. It’s like: Mate, I don’t hate Arsenal. They just didn’t play very well. You must know that, there were 60,000 people in the stadium and they were all slagging them off! I can’t have been the only one to notice.”

Though Samuel is as affable in person as he can be in print, he is at his best when he directs his acerbic wit at the things (in both the sporting and political worlds) that annoy him. It is, as such, unsurprising that in cyberspace he is showered with praise and vitriol in equal measure. The two-hour interview he gave was punctuated by nuggets of opinion, expressed in a way that might have his audience either doubled up with laughter or on the phone to their lawyer.

On his profession: “There are a lot of journalists out there who you wouldn’t trust to write a note to the milkman.” On the perks of watching professional sport for a living: “I could not care less about what the cup of tea is like or whether you can get a decent sandwich at half time.” On secondary education in Britain: “I’m not saying 10 GCSEs is anything special. I wouldn’t trust some people who’ve got 10 GCSEs to find their back pocket with both hands.”

And yet Samuel combines these hammer-blows to propriety with a razor-sharp ability to observe and assess—one which has earned him a lucrative move from the Times to the Daily Mail. Why had he moved from Britain’s oldest and most esteemed newspaper to one that has the reputation for being rather politically reactionary?

“It was for all sorts of things,” Samuel begins cautiously. “I’m not going to pretend it was just ‘for the challenge’. There were all sorts of reasons. It was a better job. It was a better job financially, a better job in terms of what I was being asked to do. I never thought I would leave the Times, but the Daily Mail is a newspaper where when they want you, they make it clear in no uncertain terms that they want you.” In fairness to Samuel, he was so honest about his economic motive—rumours of a £400,000 per year salary abound—that you could hardly hold it against him.

But one wonders whether a move from the serious pages of the Times would necessitate a change in style.

“I haven’t changed a single word going from the Times to the Daily Mail,” he maintains. “I used to write for both the Times and the News of the World, and people used to say it must be strange to go from one to the other.

“All I found was that you had to get to the point quicker… you had to make the point a little bit sharper. But in terms of people thinking you change your vocabulary or things like that, I never found that. I think it would be patronising in the extreme to talk down to readers, and it would be very fake to talk up, to try and pretend you were something you weren’t. I once started a column with a Proust quote in the French but that was just a little joke because Simon Barnes [a former colleague at the Times] always quotes Proust and so I did it as a laugh, and not only that, but I did it in French.”

On leaving school at 18, Samuel gave himself a year to establish himself as a journalist, taking a job at Hayters agency. The job bore fruit, and he never made it to university. He admits that missing out on student life—he had planned to read English—was a difficult sacrifice to make.

“I always look back and think that [university] looked great, it looked like a lot of fun. But I spent my years 18 to 21 at Crystal Palace on a Tuesday night, stuff like that. Obviously not every Tuesday—some Tuesdays I’d go to Brentford.”

Clearly Samuel is passionate about journalism, and he retains great optimism for the future of his industry.

“The best value in Britain today is a good newspaper,” he says animatedly, before launching into a polemic about the price of coffee.

In addition, it is clear from the way he talks about sport that he adores his job, even despite some occupational hazards. A football stadium is not always the most comfortable office environment.

“I used to turn up to cover every event in collar and tie, but that went out the window long ago,” he says. “You used to ruin too many good suits—catch it on a nail, get covered in dust, stuff like that.”

So he has seen plenty of grim places? “They’ve got their own charm you see, even the small places. Sometimes it’s not the place, it’s the sport that’s awful, because you can be in the grimmest place, but if you’re watching Yeovil holding Liverpool to a 0-0 draw, it’s fantastic. You’re looking at it thinking ‘this is magnificent, and I know the roof hasn’t stopped leaking onto my table for two hours, but this is magnificent’. So it’s the sport that makes a place grim.”

A relatively uncontroversial conclusion maybe, but even the most opinionated people have to have some time off.

James Appell, the Sport editor at the Oxonian Review, is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford.

Born in 1978, Adam Thirlwell read English at New College, Oxford, before taking up a Prize Fellowship at All Souls College in 1999. In 2003, Granta placed him on its list of Best Young British Novelists, even before his first novel, Politics, had come out in print. The book was published to international acclaim a few months later. It won a Betty Trask award and has been translated into thirty languages. Thirlwell’s second book, Miss Herbert (2007), which won a Somerset Maugham award, describes itself as “an inside-out novel, with novelists as characters”.

Thirlwell’s works turn people and ideas upside down and inside out, swivelling around characters and unravelling situations to show that things are rarely as simple as they seem. Politics is less about politics than it is about the emotional and sexual vagaries of a threesome of twenty-something Londoners. Miss Herbert is less about Miss Herbert—an English governess who may or may not have been Flaubert’s mistress, and may or may not have helped him translate Madame Bovary—than it is about style, translation, and the novel as an international art form.

For a number of years Thirlwell was assistant editor of Areté, an Oxford-based Arts magazine edited by Craig Raine. He has written for the Guardian, the Observer, Esquire, the Believer, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and Le Monde. His next book, The Escape, will be published in September 2009.

As the blurb on the paperback edition of Politics announces, your first book is about “a) a father and daughter b) a threesome”. It is also, in fact, about the relations between sex and morality, sex and politics, and the art of the novel. How did the idea for such an eclectic, unusual book take shape?

Very slowly, hesitantly, by thinking about this (to me) comical idea of three people who develop a sexual situation which is beyond them. Then even more slowly, rewriting, then more rewriting. Then deciding that all the psychology was too obscure, and so the narrative voice would have to open out the novel, and so I ended up with this story narrated by an exhibitionist narrator. But then as soon as this narrator had emerged, then it became natural and necessary for the narrator to develop his own personality, and so all the miniature essays on various moral and political topics emerged. And so in this way the problem of form returned to the problem of subject matter which I’d started with—because this question of liberty which had at first been just a problem of the characters became identical to the question of liberty which exercised the narrator in relation to the characters themselves. In other words, then: with no preconceived plan, no strategy, no forward planning.

How autobiographical is the novel? It is full of tantalizing references to the likes, dislikes, behaviour, and beliefs of its first-person narrator. “I love Milan Kundera”, he writes; “I can be very selfish”, he confesses; and “Me, I believe in generosity”, he asserts. Even statements which would deny the existence of a straightforward connection between the narrator and his characters abet suspicions that he is intimately related to them. “I am not a character”, he states, and “This is not my psychology”, he insists. But how much of yourself have you written into the book?

Me? I am everyone. That’s honestly the most precise answer I can give you.

The book was published when you were 24, and is in large part about the sex lives of three people in their mid-20s. It is, in these senses, a young persons’ book. It also feels fresh artistically—experimental and original. How far, if at all, did you have a young audience in mind for this book?

There was no forward planning, no strategy—and therefore no audience in mind. And I think that one should never think about an audience. The novelist’s duty is only towards the material. Maybe, when it’s finished, you can allow yourself an amused moment, thinking of people who might be appalled and upset by what you write. The anti-reader, the anti-audience. But that should only be a brief and extraneous pleasure.

At one point your narrator intervenes forcefully to “make this clear”: “This is not their sex life. That is not what you are reading about. You are reading about their feelings. You are reading about their ethics.” Yet there can be no denying that there is a lot of sex in Politics. Indeed, addressing the reader after the first few pages, your narrator anticipates this kind of response: “Maybe you even thought the writing was obscene.” Why the focus on sex? Were you motivated by the desire to shock?

No, not shock! If a novelist’s aim is to shock, I think, it implies a lack of self-confidence. So no, this focus on sex—it was more of a glee at the idea that there was so much material that hadn’t been treated in literature: so much ineptitude and lack of talent for sex. The characters were young because their sex life was very specific. The era of youth, after all, might seem to be the era of sex and abandon, but it is also the era of inexperience. And so it’s the era of awkwardness, sadness, discomfort, boredom… At which point, after all, sex becomes a real moral problem: a game between competing and tender egos. That was what I wanted to write about: this sad area of the comic. The way friendliness intrudes on the erotic…

Writing about sex is notoriously difficult—as evidenced by the inauguration, in 1993, of the yearly Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which was founded by Auberon Waugh “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”. Politics is full of sex. But like your character, Nana, you “take your sex seriously”. How did you teach yourself to write about sex in ways which capture its strangeness and fumbling, touching, significant awkwardness?

The problem with sex in fiction—as with so many literary problems—is that readers are so emotional, so in thrall to covert neuroses. Look at that sentence from Auberon Waugh! So confused, and hurt, and contradictory. So intent on masking its prudishness. Like everything human, sex is a mixture of thinking and motor responses. And so, like everything human, if a novelist is true to this mixture then the writing will work. It just requires a calm and exposed honesty. But I think that in a way it’s easier to describe the kind of sex my poor characters had in Politics—earnest, hopeless, hesitant. It’s much more difficult, maybe, to be true to the moments of absolute lyrical and wordless sex.

Having made sex and relationships the motor of your plot and the anchoring point of many of your book’s central themes, why emphasize politics in the title?

For one very serious reason—to turn the novel upside down, to emphasise how this novel which functioned through sex scenes had never really been concerned with the sex: the sex was always part of a larger network of themes: moral, political—all the grand ideas which we are used to separating from our private lives. And also for a very flippant reason: to be a deliberately weightless title; to take this category which is seen as so important and then, in its flimsy relation to the novel’s subject matter, to imply that in fact politics was much more minute, with its awkward abstractions, than the infinite intricate problems of being in love. Or not in love.

In “The Cyrillic Alphabet”, the story published in the issue of Granta which named you as one of the Best Young British Novelists, you describe the relationship between a 41-year old woman and a 79-year old man through the details of their abortion of a child which they both, secretly, would have preferred to keep. Neither can say this, for fear of imposing, of being selfish. Both stifle this truth out of love. Selflessness backfires, as it does, also, in Politics. Whence this preoccupation with the dangers of selflessness?

A covert attempt to defend my own rebarbative egotism? A constant interest in finding irony and comedy where neither irony nor comedy should exist? Or maybe just a melancholy love of characters who try to create utopias, however small, and however much they might fail? Or maybe all of these are true.

In Politics, this concern with ethical matters becomes more explicit. Your narrator announces early on that “This book is not about sex. No. It is about goodness.” Later, the omniscient voice re-iterates that “In this book, my characters have sex, my characters do everything, for moral reasons.” Does the book have a moral message?

None whatsoever.

The narrator of Politics has a strong, recognizable, all-knowing first-person voice. Why this choice to return to what is, essentially, a nineteenth-century convention of narrative omniscience?

It’s a nineteenth-century convention, true—but I don’t think it emerged from the nineteenth-century: much more from the eighteenth century of Sterne and Diderot and Pushkin, and from the twentieth century of Musil and Kundera. And in a way I think that this idea of omniscience isn’t quite right: what I enjoyed in that voice was that it made everything more fragile—it was a way of trying to emphasise how much fiction was illusion, without wanting to destroy the illusion, at the same time. And the tone is very particular: there’s an intimacy and vulnerability to the narrator. If I ever reread it (rarely) it’s that which always surprises me. And it’s not something which a nineteenth-century novelist would ever have allowed.

As you say, there’s is much more to this narrative voice of yours than mere omniscience. Your “I” constantly draws attention to itself, commenting on the action in explicitly personal terms. In the second sentence of the book, for instance, your narrator asserts that “I think you are going to like Moshe. His girlfriend’s name is Nana. I think you will like her too.” How did this prominent “I”—a feature of all your writings—develop?

It was necessitated, I thought, by the material—the sad and awkward altruistic psychologies of the characters. And I decided to be unembarrassed of explication—to go against all my modernist principles that a novelist should show and not tell. But then I realised that it could be used to retrieve modernist principles as well: to allow formal invention, to include material not usually found in a novel. It allowed liberty.

This voice returns again, very clearly, in your second book, Miss Herbert. Miss Herbert is, as you describe it, “an inside-out novel, with novelists as characters” which is “about the art of the novel”. It has “no plot, no fiction, no finale”. It is, clearly, very different from Politics. But the voice remained. Why did you choose to stick with it from one work to the next?

I’m not entirely sure. Just as with Politics, the first draft of Miss Herbert was much more impersonal. But something felt wrong. And when the voice returned, once again it became easier to find the form I wanted—a juxtaposition of thematic units. I think I must feel that there are still possibilities to this way of writing which I haven’t exhausted yet. Or I’m deeply unimaginative (readers can delete as applicable).

At one point in Miss Herbert, you state that one mark of artistic originality is that “once a novelist has discovered a style (…) he or she has to learn how to repeat it. Once a novelist has a style, the only style left to imitate is itself.” Is the voice deployed in Politics and Miss Herbert your original style—a style you anticipate “imitating” in all your writings?

I don’t think I can answer that. I’ve no idea what I might do with this voice, or this style. And I don’t think my style exists only in that voice: it’s partly that, of course, but it’s also there in the slightly melancholic, vulnerable tone; or scenes where an idealist is comically reduced by circumstances; or a liking for collage-like structures. At the moment, all I feel is that something feels live for me as soon as I use the word ‘I’: there seems to be more at stake. And I like that. The whole project feels more risky—something to do with the combination of this very fragile tone with very weighty subject matter.

The narrator refers to Miss Herbert as a novel throughout the book. Is it not more of a literary-critical treatise, a collection of Thirlwellian pensées on style, translation, literary history, and the novel?

Maybe, maybe. Obviously, the idea that it was a novel was a joke. But every joke is serious. And I think I wanted to see how much one could do with this idea of thematic juxtaposition and variation—how much it might be possible to make a novel out of other people’s novels. Where ideas would take the place of characters. And there IS a plot, in a way: a constant backwards and forwards movement between different ideas on style and translation, which reaches some kind of sad resolution at the end. Calling it a novel was perhaps a way of pointing to the fact that even without an overt and linear argument, a book about novels could still have a form. The most abstract novel possible, but still, in a way, a novel….

You write in Miss Herbert that the “The only duty, for a novelist, or a poet, or a novelist-poet, is to be interesting.” But you also write of your desire (shared with the likes of Witold Gombrowicz and Gustave Flaubert) “for an absolute aesthetic”. Then again you express doubts as to whether aesthetics can be separated from ethics. Do you have a final view on these questions?

None whatsoever.

But no: I should try to say something more. So, then.

More and more, I think that it might be that there should be an entirely different set of formal criteria for reading and for writing. I wonder if a lot of literary criticism suffers from category mistakes: that aesthetic principles which might be true of writing should have no place in the aesthetic principles required for reading. So that every novelist has to understand that style is ethical as well as aesthetic; but every reader should ignore this entirely. Readers should try to become as unethical as possible.

Perhaps.

A very prominent theme in Miss Herbert concerns questions of influence and originality. You write that “Originality more often consists in the new combination of old things, than the new combination of new things”, and that “Reading ambitiously, a writer is on the lookout for techniques to adapt.” No anxiety of influence for you then?

I think anxiety of influence is just another form of the way in which the twentieth century—well the twentieth century as embodied in critics—tried to diminish writers, to ignore the real questions of form. Why should there be anxiety? Every good novelist knows that they possess a style. And there can never be any real repetition, not between two genuine stylists. That, after all, is the meaning of Borges’s story “Pierre Menard”, which I use in Miss Herbert. There can be no such thing as a precise copy. I think the idea of the anxiety of influence misses the joy of every homage – the delighted discovery of new ways of describing reality precisely. So no… No anxiety…

You are very interested indeed, in Miss Herbert, in the great prose writers of the nineteenth century and of the early- to mid-twentieth century. To which, of the many eminent authors you discuss (Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov, Bellow, Pushkin—to name just a handful among dozens that you mention) do you feel most indebted? Which do you admire most?

But the two questions aren’t the same! I admire all the writers in Miss Herbert—and many more—but that doesn’t mean that I’m indebted to them. I feel in many ways, say, that a lot of my comic sense and narrative voice must be indebted to the amount of P. G. Wodehouse I read when I was a kid… And a debt can be so small—a way of constructing a sentence, or managing transitions between paragraphs—but may be momentous to the novelist in constructing a form. Or so massive—a way of looking at the world (Kundera’s idea of laughable love, for instance, for me) but have no material influence on the novels themselves.

What about contemporary authors? Which among their number to you respect, admire, plunder?

I’ve mentioned Kundera already. I’ve plundered him in some ways—but more as a sanction for my experiments with voice and form, than by way of any direct steals. I admire Pynchon very much. And Philip Roth. But I don’t feel any desire to plunder them. I think, in general, you should plunder the dead.

You quote the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s view of literary history as “a giant game of ping-pong,” where the talented players “hit smashes over the nets formed by the borders of States and nations”. You follow this up with a vision of your own: “A café where everyone’s playing ping-pong: that’s my new definition of literary history.” With whom are you playing ping-pong?

I’ve just finished a farcical novel about a character in a spa town—which I suppose was an extended game of ping-pong with Thomas Mann, and Saul Bellow. And maybe slightly with Hrabal himself. But your opponent might change at any moment, depending on what your subject is—or what your form is. There’s no need to keep playing the same opponents, after all. And it’s always good to play ping-pong while pretending to be playing something else…

Miss Herbert is much exercised with different conceptions of style. In the course of the book you re-define the word many times. “Styles are systems of operations on language for the contrivance of effects. They are like machines”; “No style is just a style: it is its subject matter as well.” And most crucially, “style”, as Marcel Proust first put it, and as you concur, is “a quality of vision” and “not identical to the language in which it takes form”. There is one, among the many definitions you offer, which is more cryptic than the rest. Style, you say, is “biological as much as a formal—in a person’s teeth, the arteries, the kidneys, in the left and right ventricles”. What do you mean by this?

I mean that it’s as inescapable as one’s breathing pattern, or what one likes to eat. You can’t help revealing it. That’s the deepest, and most mysterious aspect of style—because it’s where style becomes metaphysical. A demonstration of the self. And all the novelists I love, I think, are in love with this individual self. All writing is a celebration of uniqueness. But then, all celebrations, in the end, are celebrations of uniqueness. What else is there to celebrate?

Scarlett Baron received her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford. The interviews editor for the Oxonian Review, she is currently a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Interview conducted by email, January 2009.

Born in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of two books of stories, three collections of essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain (2002), and ten novels. These include Metroland (1980), Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), and most recently, Arthur and George (2005). In his latest work, an essayistic memoir entitled Nothing To Be Frightened Of (2008), Barnes considers the prospect of his own death with a terror unmitigated by religion, philosophy, or the musings of his literary ancestors.

How do you feel about your readers these days? There was a time when you seemed rather combative about the interest readers take in your life as well as in your work.

In the face of the reader’s interest in your life as well as in your books, you find yourself reacting in two ways. On the one hand, you adopt a high-minded Flaubertian position and maintain that only the art matters; on the other you react like an ordinary human being. I think the books ought to be enough—just as a piece of music ought to be enough, just as a painting ought to be enough. A work of art ought to explain itself: if it doesn’t, it fails. At the same time, I’m as interested as anyone else in artists’ and writers’ lives. I’m as gossipy as anyone else. So I understand that if people like your stuff they will quite often also want to know something about you.

In The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003) you wrote that ‘the best books persuade readers that do not even know the author that they are friends of his’.

Yes. One of the most important decisions you have to make when you’re starting a book concerns the relationship with the reader. You have to determine every time where you and your reader are to stand in relation to each other. In general I like the reader to be as close as possible.

What does that mean—to have the reader as close as possible?

This is how I visualize the relationship. There are some writers who go up to a lectern when they write—they stand at a podium and the reader is down there in the audience, and the writer tells the reader about life and what it consists of and what its truths are. By contrast, I like to think of the writer and the reader sitting together, not face to face, but side by side, looking out in the same direction, through something like a café window. And then in my scenario, the writer asks the reader ‘What do you think she’s like? He looks a bit odd, doesn’t he? Now why are they having a quarrel?’ The reader’s gaze runs parallel to the writer’s gaze—the writer is just a little bit ahead because he’s spotted these things first.

You once said that ‘a first-rate critic is always less important and less interesting than a second-rate writer. The critic’s job is, firstly, to explain, but secondly to celebrate rather than diminish.’ Has your attitude towards literary critics mellowed?

I wouldn’t say that I’ve mellowed. But I don’t think that that view is necessarily antagonistic. It’s quite hard to review novels and yet lots of people do it without much skill. I’ve reviewed hundreds of novels in my time and I think I’ve only ever written one review that I would reprint. It was a review of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife—which I think is his best book—and it took me three or four weeks to write. I think the only development in my thinking about critics—and I don’t think about them very much—is probably that I feel more kindly towards academic critics than I do towards newspaper critics. I regard newspaper critics as a hurdle of misunderstanding that the book has to overcome before it reaches its readers.

Do you loathe critics in advance of a book coming out?

I’m not as bad as Philip Roth, who used to live in both England and America, and used to leave whichever country had a book of his coming out. But I haven’t read a British review for around seven or eight years now.

Why is that?

It’s two things really. I’ve never read a review which made me a better writer—I’ve never read a review which pointed out something to me which made me write the next book in a different or better way. And I’m no better at taking criticism that I think is unfair, or at being rubbished—I don’t think you get any better at that. So you find yourself skimming reviews for words of praise and I think that’s a bit ignoble really.

One of your short stories, ‘Gnossienne,’ begins with the sentence: ‘Let me make it clear that I never attend literary conferences.’ There’s a conference being held on the topic of ‘Julian Barnes and the European tradition’ in June at Liverpool Hope University, isn’t there? Are you going along?

Yes, there is. And yes, I am. I’m not going to attend the conference in the sense of sitting through the papers. I’m going along partly because a number of good friends will be there, and also because I think that if people are coming from all over the world to a conference in my country about me, the least I can do is to actually turn up, to be available for an interview and to answer any questions that might arise. That seems a sort of courtesy call.

You said once that knowing that your books are studied in schools and universities registers with you like an intimation of death…

Yes, it does. When people started studying me I did feel—and I still do feel to some extent—like saying, ‘Hang on… I haven’t finished yet—don’t make generalizations about my work while I’m still writing.’ And there’s another reason why I worry about becoming a ‘set text’. I remember what it’s like to be at school and to be made to read the wrong writer at the wrong time—how you can be put off a writer for life. In an ideal world, readers would come to your books through some mysterious system of traction, some sixth sense. It makes me very anxious to think that a potential reader might be put off by being forced to study me.

You recently translated and edited a notebook in which Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) chronicled his slow, painful, syphilitic decline (In the Land of Pain, 2002). How did that come about?

I came across Daudet’s notebook in the Taylorian Library in Oxford while researching Flaubert’s Parrot. I remember thinking, ‘This is wonderful.’ Then one day I found myself about to write one of those columns for the TLS which say, ‘Here’s something brilliant that’s never been translated—someone should do it.’ Then I thought, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ It was very difficult, but I enjoyed it. It took a very long time. I think good translation probably takes longer than the original writing.

Let’s talk about your latest book, Nothing To Be Frightened Of. In the book you describe yourself as agnostic, yet at several points you come across sounding more atheistic than agnostic. You concede, for instance, that in some cases religion may do no harm, ‘except for not being true’; elsewhere you describe religion as a ‘beautiful lie’.

I think I’m probably an atheist but I’m always alarmed by dogma and I think atheism can be a dogma as much as anything else. I don’t think I’m smart enough to know that there isn’t a god.

You don’t think that belief in god is just a silly idea?

I think it’s a rather nice idea. But I haven’t come across any evidence that there is any organising body out there. Indeed there are many things about the nature of human life which seem to me to argue strongly against the existence of a god. Think of Burma [being struck by Cyclone Nargis]. How many of these poor Burmese people are going be wondering, ‘Maybe there isn’t a god after all, maybe Buddha isn’t all that loving if disasters such as these can happen?’

The debate about religion and the value of atheism has recently flared up among British intellectuals. Did you make a deliberate choice to position yourself as more liberal in your statements than, say, Dawkins, Hitchens, Amis, Grayling?

It’s more that while I think institutional religions have done quite a lot of damage as well as some good, I don’t despise the religious instinct, which most human beings, in most societies, have. If you’re a novelist, your job is to understand other human beings and to represent them faithfully and truly; and for many people the religious instinct is a very central part of being a human being. However, in the face of militant Islam or fundamentalist Christianity, it’s very good that there is a powerful, intellectually coherent, atheist lobby. But I don’t go along with despising people because they are so weak as to need to believe in an afterlife. ‘Atheism is aristocratic,’ as Robespierre put it.

Dawkins features a lot in Nothing To Be Frightened Of as your archetypal ‘Category One Atheist’—but it’s not entirely clear whether you endorse him or not.

I admire what he’s written and I read him with great pleasure. I think he’s a very necessary person on the scene. At some point I’ve found myself wondering how he will die—whether he can be as seemingly blithe as he is about saying ‘when I’m dying I just want life to be taken out of me as if it were an appendix.’ I wonder whether one really can feel like that about one’s own death. I find it very perplexing that people aren’t more upset at the thought of their own extinction.

Much of your book concerns your fear of death. Do you harbour any other emotions about death?

Yes. I hate it too. But the trouble with combining emotions is that one risks personifying death too much. You mustn’t turn death into a metaphor, a guy with a scythe. Death isn’t the single stalking figure that cuts you down. Death is just a process. It’s just like some terrible, heartless, bland bureaucracy at work, busily fulfilling its quota, as it always does. To personify death with too many grades of emotion is to do it too much honour.

You say in the book that you sometimes find life ‘an overrated way of spending time’. Would you describe yourself as desperate?

No. I would say that I’m a cheerful pessimist.

You say that you’re not a confessional writer, but write that ‘my fear of death has become an essential part of me’—surely the admission of such a preoccupation is confessional?

I suppose it is. I don’t think of the book as confessional because I think of confessional literature as literature that is written to get something off your chest. I don’t believe in therapeuto-autobiographical theory at all. I think of this book as an exercise in examining myself as a case and as an answer to a question: at this point in time, what does it mean not to believe in anything and yet not be reconciled to the notion that you’re going to die?

Is the book in part an injunction to people to talk about death more?

Yes. I think we don’t talk about death enough these days. It’s partly because we live longer—and expect to live longer—and partly because death has gone out of the house. We don’t sit at people’s bedsides any more, or if we do, we do so in hospitals. We hand over dying and death to professionals who tell us what to do and how to behave and where to turn up. They don’t tell us how grief is going to work though—they’re not very good at that.

You say of the artists you admire most, a group that includes Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and Jules Renard (1864-1910), that ‘they are my daily companions but also my ancestors. They are my true bloodline.’ In Something to Declare (2002), you insisted that ‘Not Shutting Up About Flaubert is a necessary pleasure.’ In Nothing To Be Frightened Of Jules Renard takes centre-stage, grabbing the limelight from Flaubert. Did part of you think that some readers might have had enough of Flaubert and that you should introduce a new literary figure?

No. It was more that Flaubert didn’t have much more to say about death than what I used in the book. I mean… there might have been something of what you say in it too. I think you’re right actually. I think that when Flaubert came into one draft, I did picture my reader thinking, ‘oh no, here he is going on about Flaubert all over again.’ But I don’t think I bumped up Renard’s contribution to an unfair degree. He writes about death in a way that is closer to the way in which I feel about it, as Daudet also does: they look at death in the same register as everything else in life, whereas Flaubert sometimes seems to me to be striving for something slightly heroic when it comes to death.

Larkin comes up a lot. He’s different from your other literary protagonists—died relatively recently, English, a poet…

He’s my favourite poet of the last half of the twentieth century. When I first read him I remember thinking instantly ‘Ha! I’ve found a new person who speaks to me directly and intimately and tells the truth.’ I re-read him a lot.

Would you call Flaubert a literary father?

I think he’s a profound and iconic figure in my writing life. Do I think he’s actually influenced the way I write fiction? No. Because he’s French. And because he’s dead. And because he’s more than a hundred years away now. But in terms of how you should conduct yourself as a writer and the high ambition and ideals you should have if you set up as a writer? Yes, definitely.

Is there anything in your writing that you would say has been shaped by Flaubert?

I don’t know because so many things go into the mix, and it’s impossible to tell to what extent a Flaubertian attribute is also intrinsically one of your own. Take irony. I’ve always been an ironic person. You don’t need Flaubert to inspire or authorise irony.

You see yourself as an ironist and you see Flaubert as an ironist. In Nothing To Be Frightened Of death and god enter as ironists as well. What is it that you value so highly about irony?

It’s a way of saying things aren’t as they seem. It gives you X-ray vision. It allows you to see round the back of things. It responds to the fact that reality isn’t single-natured. It allows you two responses to the complexity of reality. It makes it possible to be serious and jokey at the same time. It’s the ‘snorkel of sanity’ as I think I described it in Flaubert’s Parrot. Is it ‘the devil’s mark,’ my protagonist wonders, or ‘the snorkel of sanity’? That is to say: does it curse you or does it save you? Renard puts it brilliantly: ‘Irony doesn’t dry up the grass, it only burns off the weeds.’

Julian Barnes’s Nothing To Be Frightened Of was published by Jonathan Cape in March 2008. For more information see www.julianbarnes.com.

Scarlett Baron is a DPhil student in English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. She is writing about the influence of Flaubert on James Joyce.

Dan Rather
The Rothermere American Institute
Oxford, 10 November 2005

Anchor and managing editor for CBS Evening News for twenty-four years, Dan Rather is one of the best-known figures of modern American journalism. In a recent visit to Oxford, he offered some reflections on Ronald Reagan’s relationship with America in an address to a conference hosted by the Rothermere American Institute on The United States in the 1980s: The Reagan Years. We are pleased to publish an excerpt from Rather’s lecture.

When I was going over the program for this conference, one of the titles that caught my eye was the question raised by Gil Troy of McGill University: ‘Toward a historiography of Reagan and the 1980s…why are we doing such a lousy job?’ As I think most of you probably know, I am not an historian. It is not for me to judge the quality of the historical work being done on Ronald Wilson Reagan, fortieth president of the United States of America. But if a ‘lousy job’ is being done in this area, it occurs to me that one reason may very well be that, though nearly two decades have passed since President Reagan’s second term ended, whatever dust gathered on the Reagan presidency has been given very little chance to settle.

Put another way: To engage many of the big historical questions concerning Ronald Reagan’s legacy is to find oneself smack in the middle of the political debates that continue to transfix and, to varying degrees, divide America today, twenty years after the height of Reaganism.

There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that two decades is simply not all that long a time and perhaps provides an inadequate vantage point for gaining a great deal of historical perspective. But the most obvious manifestation of—and cause for—this situation is the degree to which the current President Bush has, consciously and avowedly, embraced the Reagan presidency as a model.

Some simplify this with the formula that George Herbert Walker Bush is George W. Bush’s biological father, but Ronald Reagan is his political father. But the implications go beyond symbolic questions of political patrimony to those of policy, where they resonate in debates ranging from those on tax policy to the wisdom or folly of deficit spending to approaches toward foreign policy.

If historians are having difficulty grappling with Reagan’s legacy, it may be because journalists have gone way over deadline in this first draft of history. That cannot be properly put to bed until the politicians and their spokesmen and, indeed, the American public have finished with the subject. As of this late date, they have not. It’s my opinion that they are not likely to for some time.

There may be considerably more consensus on the subject of Ronald Reagan, the man, and how that man occupied, inhabited, and indeed embodied the office of the presidency than there is about the policies he generated in that role. If the 20th century was the American century, then Ronald Reagan embodied its breadth and scope as well as any public figure America produced in that century.

Let’s look for a moment at Ronald Reagan in the context of his times, at least as the popular imagination has come to frame them in hindsight. He was born and spent his early youth in Tampico, Illinois, a place that, even today, remains the quintessence of small-town, middle America (Population: 772). At a time when the iconic American young man was the collegiate football player, Reagan was a three-time varsity letterman at Eureka College. In the era we remember as ‘The Golden Age of Radio,’ Reagan was on the radio, as a sports announcer. In 1937, just in time for Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age, Reagan took the screen test for Warner Brothers that led to his film career. While Franklin Roosevelt was President, Reagan considered himself an ardent New-Dealer; During World War II, Reagan served in the US Army’s Motion Picture Unit. When Washington, D.C. was consumed with the question of Communist infiltration of Hollywood, Reagan (then president of the Screen Actor’s Guild) testified as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In the 1950s, Reagan resurrected his flagging acting career by becoming one of the first motion-picture actors to make the jump to television, just in time for ‘Television’s Golden Age.’ When the modern American conservative movement was born with the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, there was none other than Ronald Reagan beginning his own political career in earnest with what would later become known, simply, as ‘The Speech.’ At a time when the state of California was both ground zero for American foment in the 1960s and primary incubator of the American counterculture—there was Governor Reagan, at the forefront of the ‘Establishment’ opposition.

While I don’t mean to suggest that Reagan was some sort of real-life Zelig, it is remarkable to note the degree to which he was involved—to which he involved himself —in so many of the defining movements and events of his times. Not always blowing with the prevailing winds, not always at the very epicenter of things, but involved in a way few people are, over such a prolonged stretch of time. His was a significant and, to a large degree, emblematic American life, and was so well before he was elected president.

The well-worn title bestowed on Reagan as the ‘Great Communicator’ sometimes grates on his partisans, who see in it either an effort to damn by faint praise or a reluctance to credit the Reagan ideology—or both. But the fact remains that he was an extraordinary spokesman for the beliefs that he held and that his fellow Republicans and conservatives share still. And in a democratic republic, the ability of a leader to communicate his or her beliefs is no small thing. As president, Reagan always seemed to grasp that policy and politics need to be well-harnessed to the horse of persuasion.

We are so inundated with information, not to mention a self-conscious awareness of the political process, that speeches—if we ever hear more of them than a few ever-shorter sound-bites—seem inevitably to have lost a good deal of their power to truly move the public. In the Reagan years, however, the current period of great change in media was only just getting underway. This small bit of good timing combined well with professional gifts of communication to enable Reagan, as president, to convey externally the unique and large piece of the America psyche that resided within him. In this he succeeded to a remarkable degree, and in so doing was able to achieve much according to the terms he had laid out for himself and for his administration.

Among the articles marking Reagan’s passing last year was a perceptive piece in which Reagan biographer and Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon recast something that Walter Lippmann had once said of Charles de Gaulle: ‘The greatness of Reagan,’ Cannon wrote, ‘was not that he was in America, but that America was inside of him.’

At the time that Cannon wrote this, amid a sea of eulogies, it would have been easy to dismiss such a remark as a mere platitude. But that would have been a mistake, for I feel it gets to the very beating heart of why Reagan enjoyed and continues to enjoy such popularity among the American public: ‘America was inside of him.’

By the time Reagan was elected president, his understanding of his country and its major currents must have been innate, even if one discounts all his considerable rhetorical and oratorical skill. President Reagan did not really have to reach—except within himself—in order to connect with his fellow Americans.

Much was, is, and continues to be made of the fact that Reagan was an actor. But the celebrated Reagan traits of friendliness and warmth were not mere illusions of the television screen. If anything, he came across as friendlier and warmer in person.

I recall an interview I had with him while he was president, at the start of my own tenure as CBS News anchor. At one point in the interview, we took a break and one of his aides, Michael Deaver, approached me to do a bit of lobbying concerning an answer the president had given to one of my questions. Deaver hardly had the chance to speak, though, before the president walked over and said, ‘You know, this is something I should talk to Dan about myself’—and he said, in essence, ‘I’m a little uncomfortable with that answer…and certainly you will decide, but as I think about it I wasn’t at my best, and if you could see your way clear to give me another crack at the question or revisit the subject, I’d certainly appreciate it.’

Now, we journalists like to think of ourselves as hard-bitten types for whom such niceties do not make a difference. But the reality is that they often do. And by resisting any impulse towards imperiousness either by himself or his staff, by instead being so genuine and sincere in his approach, he did himself a service in his relations with the press in general and this reporter in particular.
To return to the subject of Ronald Reagan, onetime actor: I think one might look upon his actor’s training not as any kind of stand-in for substance and sincerity, but rather as a tool that Reagan had in his arsenal that helped him to project what was already inside of him. I’m sure, in the endless gantlet of personal appearances that the political professional must make—speeches, fundraisers, meet-and-greets, and on and on, the ability to appear ‘on’ even when he did not necessarily feel ‘on’ must have been a tremendous asset.

This last bit, though, is just guesswork. And without making any judgment on the policies that Reagan, as president, espoused or enacted, or their degree of consistency with his stated ideological positions, what we can say with some certainty is that Ronald Reagan knew how to personify the American spirit of his times, and reflect it back to an American public that generally liked what it saw. This ability served his presidency very well, in the public’s perception, and continues to do so.

With his light and tremulous tone, Ian Bostridge has grown to be one of the most eagerly sought classical singers in the world today. Since his London debut in 1994 singing Winterreise, he has established himself as the foremost—and most debated—English tenor of his generation and has won Gramophone Awards for recordings of Schumann lieder (1998) and Schubert’s cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (1996). Hans Werner Henze composed his Sechs Gesänge aus dem Arabischen (1999) for Bostridge’s voice, and in 2004 Bostridge performed the role of Caliban in the triumphant première of Thomas Adës’ The Tempest.

His regular musical collaborators include Julius Drake and Leif Ove Andsnes and this year he returned to the studio to re-record Die Schöne Müllerin with the great Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida. A glamorous partnership, it did not avoid some sniping in the press: ‘His shallow voice is incapable of eroticism,’ lamented Andrew Collins in The Guardian, echoing an earlier criticism of his Winterreise suggesting that Bostridge sounded ‘like an Oxbridge Choral Scholar who’s gone out without his scarf ’.

Yet voices, through their innate relationship with the body, are always likely to garner divided appraisals, and not even the greatest artists are beyond reproach. In a recent interview with the same newspaper, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was confidently asserted to be ‘the greatest lieder-singer of the twentieth-century’, yet his position was not always so secure: spat Roland Barthes in The Grain of the Voice (1972), ‘everything in the (semantic and lyrical) structure is respected and yet nothing seduces, nothing sways us to jouissance. His art […] never exceeds culture.’ To much of the current listening public, the culture associated with Bostridge is academic: an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi and a graduate of St John’s, he holds a doctorate in History and continues to write occasional pieces for the TLS and the broadsheets (interested parties should also turn to Witchcraft and its Transformations, OUP).

As with Fischer-Dieskau, the model for many young lieder singers today, Bostridge’s intellectualised and highly literate approach has come under criticism from those who feel that the erotic — or instinctive — aspects of singing should be primary. Audiences clearly feel otherwise: his performances at Wigmore Hall are always sold out months in advance. With favoured composers, such as Schubert and Britten, his vivid attention to text and immaculate phrasing offer rewards that few of his contemporaries can match, and certainly refute any idea of ‘the singer’ as a simply intuitive – and therefore unthinking—creature of nature. On the eve of his return to Oxford on 24 May 2005 to sing at the Sheldonian Theatre, I interviewed him to find out more. (The concert was later canceled due to illness).

§

DR: In the booklet note to your new recording of Die Schöne Müllerin you comment that it was the first song cycle you fell in love with, with its figure of an introspective youth. But in fact this new version strikes me as actually far less innocent. How have things changed?

IB: Well, it’s partly conscious and it’s partly just what happens to you when you get older. I’d already done one recording of the piece already, so in a way it would be pretty daft to do another one in the same way. The idea of the man in charge of artists and repertoire at EMI was that I ought to record each of the Schubert cycles with a diff erent, as it were, ‘famous’ pianist, starting with Winterreise with Leif Ove Andsnes, whom I’d been working with on other things. (Antonio Pappano will be partnering for Schwanengesang). Mitsuko rang me and asked if we could do some work together and I sort of leapt at the chance to work with her; and we did Winterreise and some Schumann and some Britten, so it seemed a good idea to do the Schöne Müllerin with her. I don’t think that the darker, or more complicated interpretation comes from her, because her playing tends to be very classical, she’s quite a classically-minded person; she has a lot of clarity in her playing, things like that. I don’t think the bitterness was particularly coming from working with her — it was more coming partly from how voices age, and partly as an interpretative choice that had developed partly consciously and partly — mainly — by performing the piece and various things occurring to me in performance.

I tried to listen to it when the first edit of this one came back, but it was weird.

You don’t like it?

It’s more that it makes you very aware of how things have changed, and that’s not necessarily a good idea. You become very self-conscious about listening to your own voice, and in my case I’m very happy with things I did five years ago and very unhappy with things I’m doing at the time. At the time I hated the sound I was making and now I quite like it and don’t like the sound I’m making now.

What’s the status of recordings for you?

They’re definitely a thing in their own right — you need to recognise that they’re different from live performance: I don’t like live recordings. The main thing about them is that they’re going to be repeated and there’s things you might do in a performance which wouldn’t bear repetition, so in a recording you’d be more careful about line, and not shouting so much—expressively—and being more careful about intonation. You can carry things through your physical presence in a performance. But it’s only ever a snapshot of your interpretation at a particular point, and it’s important that it’s different every time. I suppose the most important thing for me is that it’s theatrical and that you discover things about the piece through performance rather than by thinking about it in terms of what other people have done.

It’s certainly a much more heavily dramatised performance. Is this purely from performance or is it more considered?

It’s not rehearsed — I rehearse to make sure it’s routinised and to improve it vocally, but I don’t rehearse a performance, the performance is improvised. One of the great things about lieder singing as a form of musical theatre is that it’s so easy to do different things, because it’s so pared down, whereas in opera you’re much more encumbered by the mise-en-scene. By doing something small differently, you can change the whole feel of a piece.

Do you feel much more comfortable with lieder?

In the sense that I always feel comfortable, whereas sometimes I don’t feel comfortable in opera. There are directors I love working with and with whom I’d like to work with all the time, and apart from them I think a lot of opera is quite — well, I don’t like it. I like the things I do with Deborah Warner, and David Alden. But particularly Deborah, I’d always rather do things with her than anyone else.

You’ve recently been doing some concerts of Noel Coward, which is, I suppose, the closest you’ve come to cross-over; but, on the other hand, the booklet note to your new recording begins with a long quotation from Freud. Do you feel an obligation to forge connections between music and other things?

In a way it’s really just self-indulgent on my part, because I like seeing how things fit in culturally. And in a way, singing is always about the moment — by reading around things you’re not really preparing for the performance. I’m not a great one for performance practice, and researching exactly how people sang in 1828, that’s not my concern. But, I have noticed, and I get more and more agitated about it, that some people seem to think I’m presenting quite a dark and complicated Schubert, and I think they have a view of Schubert that — well, it still seems to be stuck in the 1930s, and I just think it’s bizarre. I’ve thought a lot about Schubert, and read a lot about Schubert, and written about Schubert and performed the pieces a lot, and I’m struck — well, the thing is as a performer never to slip into the routine or the clichéd or the standard, and what I’m shocked at is how people want to hear what they expect to hear, and what they expect to hear in Schubert is a Winterreise that’s sung by a bass or a baritone that’s very world-weary, and they want to hear a Schöne Müllerin sung by a tenor that’s rather stupid, and naïve. And they’re not really prepared to cope with what is, I think, the reality of the pieces, which is that Winterreise can, on the whole, be sung entirely in original keys only by tenors, and looking at the markings in the piece in terms of their precision and their expressionist nature, it’s absolutely clear to me that it is not the lugubrious, world-weary piece we’ve seen it as for a long time. When I was at school, we had a great debate about people who like Hans Hotter’s Winterreise and people who like Fischer-Dieskau’s, and I never really liked Hans Hotter’s — to me it’s a far more sparky piece, full of wit, and self-laceration and irony and satire — it’s a satirical piece. It’s a very 1828 piece, in a way, and in the same way Schöne Müllerin can be seen in quite a dark way. It’s a piece that people seem particularly to be stuck about. The same things were said about Matthias Goerne’s Schöne Müllerin as were said about mine, that it was in some way too dark, and complicated, and weird and twisted, and it is!

Do you feel that your earlier academic research is on a continuum with your singing, or do they inhabit quite separate spheres?

No, I’m just interested in culture generally, and I happen to be a singer. I’m not really interested in musicology. The only musicologist that I’ve read really profitably is Charles Rosen, who writes just amazingly about music in a musical way; it can be very arid. I think the same is true of early performance practice, and I think the usefulness of the early music movement has really been to stop people from falling into the same old habits, and it’s given people new colours and tempi, and allowed us to make a break between different styles of music rather than making it all the same. Subjectively, I get the same feeling when I’m in a rehearsal and I discover something — which does happen — and it gives me the same buzz as when I’d been reading pamphlets on witchcraft in the 1690s and had constructed a theory and suddenly I found a piece of evidence, quite independently, that supported my theory without my having to twist it, and you think ‘God, yes, I’m on to something’. That feeling of ‘God, yes, I’m onto something’ is very important to me and has been since I was a child; I’ve always wanted to discover things and I find that’s what I need when I’m doing something. But there’s a terrible pressure in classical music — the very name is off-putting to people because it begins with ‘class’ and people tend to associate it with authority and tend to think it should be this monolithic thing and that there’s a certain way of doing things.

But surely it’s not surprising that music should be esoteric?

Of course music can be esoteric but it’s more that there’s a feeling that things should be done in a certain way and people know how to do things and they can tell you how to do them, when actually you can do them however you want. In fact, all you’ve got is a piece of paper with some notes on it and some words, and all you’ve got to do is find something that convinces you and sell it to other people. Right at the beginning, before I was a full-time singer, a very nice baritone called Thomas Hemsley, who was on the board of the Young Person’s Concert Artist Trust, said to me, ‘You cannot move around so much on stage’, and I just didn’t understand. If I want, I can stand on my head!

Did you always expect to be a singer?

Not at all. I was a singer as a child but when I had choices about what to do, I always prioritised my academic work, so I stayed at my very academic South London prep school, rather than going to Westminster Abbey Choir School. I went for an informal interview to be a choral scholar at Magdalen and decided not to do that. At every stage, when I could have been institutionalised, I didn’t. I had a year in Cambridge as a graduate before coming back to Oxford and there I began having singing lessons again, and that’s when it started to get a bit more serious. And, I suppose because I’m a very ambitious and competitive person, I started entering competitions and things. As a graduate student I went to some of those courses at Snape Maltings in French song and English artsong, but all along I was really interested in lied, after having been introduced to it by an amazing German teacher at school, Richard Stokes. But I didn’t think I could have a career, being English, and so I just sort of carried on: when I had a job in London in television, and when I came back to Corpus as a research fellow, and then I got an agent, and then it took off.

Is it a fundamental need?

I think it has probably [become] a need to perform, but performing wasn’t really at the centre of my life for a very long time. Discovering that I liked being in opera was very important… but it’s become a need, it’s very addictive, the adrenaline rush and the structure of work, and it suits me very well, and probably much more than any other job I could have had because I don’t really like routines. The rhythm of it is very amenable.

Which singers of an older generation do you feel you have particularly learnt from?

Well, I sort of worship Fischer-Dieskau, and apart from that…! The singers of an older generation that I like are Fischer-Dieskau above all; I like Fritz Wunderlich singing Mozart and I like his voice, but I don’t like him singing lieder; I like Peter Pears singing Britten but I don’t like him singing German song, though I like to hear Britten playing German song. I sang for Fischer-Dieskau a couple of times […]. I forgot to mention Irmgard Seefried. I remember hearing Elisabeth Schwarzkopf say that she never had the natural expressive power of Seefried: ‘I was musical and worked hard’.

How would you describe your own approach?

Well I suppose I have to work hard to improve myself. I came into the job as an amateur, and I’ve had to build up a technique over the past 10 or 12 years. I do still feel that I have to keep working on that, but not lose what makes me different, which is that I didn’t go to musical college, and just related to the music.

Do you feel the need to defend your decisions?

Yes, but it’s difficult; the etiquette of classical music is that the performance speaks for itself and that there’s no exchange between the critical community and the musical community, and musicians are supposed to think that critics are beneath contempt. As I said, I have a very particular view about Schubert and maybe what I’ll do in the end is write a book about Schubert to try to demonstrate what I think, or a book about performing to demonstrate what I’m on about. But there are different tastes and styles that one likes, and the main thing is to inspire strong feeling. I always remember when I first started working with Graham Johnson, he said that if you’re ever going to be someone people really like, there’ll also be people who really hate what you do as well.

Why is Schubert so special to you?

I discovered it at the right time for me, and for me it’s exactly the right balance of music that’s intellectually challenging but also emotionally true. It has an incredible simplicity about it, the way he uses modulations. It’s just there, and there’s also an awful lot of it! I do really like Faurè and Poulenc, and the little Debussy I’ve sung — Pellèas is one of the operatic roles that I’d really like to sing, I think. But it’s very hard.

You mentioned the issue of class. How do you feel about the problems of classical music becoming commodified — the (admittedly long-standing) danger of catering for a very elite audience?

I think this pulls in two very different directions. When music becomes commodified, I think that’s turning music into background music, classic FM and so on; and I think lieder singing sort of resists that, because at its best it’s not easy listening. I think some people resist that, because when you’re outside it, it can seem spiky, or even ridiculous. And certainly very particular. I think the thing about classical music being a class-signifier is more to do with the fact that our society has lost the notion that there are great works of culture that people should… might be excited to discover and there’s a common pool of artistic excitement that in a democracy you should offer to everyone. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t broaden the repertoire, but essentially if you live in a western democracy you have a certain historical — well, things have got to where they are now because of the culture, and if you want to participate in that culture then I think you’d want to look at what that culture has produced. I don’t think it is particularly restrictive. I’d feel awkward at a pop concert, but if I were to go, I’d try to find out about it. I think it’s also partly living in a culture that doesn’t have the idea that in order to enjoy something a lot, you might have to put something into it to get anything out. Maybe that’s television culture — it’s a passive culture. It sounds very old-fashioned, and maybe patronising, but maybe the culture of working-class education at the end of the nineteenth century was incredible because people had this sense of a culture of self-education, and I suppose that is what we’ve all lost. I think we’re all drawn towards the commodification that television represents, an endless consumption of things. Shopping is the easiest thing in the world to do. Most people’s major cultural experience, where they exercise discrimination, where they look at things in terms of colour, and shape, is through shopping. Maybe other things always seem a bit strange in comparison to shopping!

Finally, how do you feel about coming back to Oxford?

I think it will just be quite strange — it will seem a very long time ago. I’m glad I got out because it wouldn’t have suited me as a life: I don’t think I have the right personality. But it’s funny to have been there for such a long time. On the one hand, it seems very close, and on the other hand, very far away.

Ditlev Rindom is an undergraduate in English Literature at Magdalen College, and a pianist.